It’s getting colder outside. It’s getting darker sooner. The time has been rolled back an hour, for those of us living in the United States. Winter is right around the corner and with winter, comes holidays. Thanksgiving is a few weeks away with Christmas coming in a close second and finally New Years. Now, why am I telling you all this? Matter of fact, why am I reminding you of these holidays? Isn’t this supposed to be a blog based on technology and not holiday seasons?

 

Well, I’m glad you asked. This part of the season is busy for us, due to the holiday specials we run. All the way from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. Everything is on sale for a fraction of the price. Everything from Virtual Private Servers (VPS) to top-of-the-line Dedicated Servers. During this time, traffic nearly quadruples to our main site, TurnKey Internet. Everyone wants to get in on the sales. Everyone wants to setup a website for their business. People are just shopping around for hosting providers if you will. Well, with that increased traffic comes increased strain on your servers which brings me to reason I’m writing this article.

 

With the holiday season rapidly approaching, you may decide to run a special on your products and services. The number one item that always occurs when running specials is an increased awareness of your product. That means you may have bandwidth spikes from potential customers viewing your website. You may have your products selling like hotcakes, but the question becomes, are you prepared for this? Are you prepared from the increased amount of traffic to your site? If you’re not sure, then you should continue reading.

 

As mentioned previously in this post, you will more than likely have a spike in traffic to your website which brings me to bandwidth. Do you have enough bandwidth ready to accommodate the spike in traffic your site may experience? If not, you should speak with your hosting provider about pricing plans for bandwidth.

 

Next, what about disk space? If you’re selling products online, more than likely you have a database storing the products with the customer information that is purchasing said products. Well if you’re running a special and have a higher than normal amount of people purchasing from you, you would want to ensure that you have enough disk space to accommodate said orders.  The last thing you want is your website to freeze or go off-line due to you running out of space because your database has tripled in size. You should speak with your hosting provider to ensure that you have enough adequate disk space.

 

This brings me to last point. You’ve checked your bandwidth and your disk space and they are more than adequate for your special. What’s next? Well, is your current environment sufficient to handle your increased sales? Let’s say your website is on a basic hosting account and receives a large spike of traffic during your holiday sales. Will your host throttle your account as it could be consuming too many resources? If your account is on a basic shared server, this is very high probability as the server will throttle your account for consuming too many resources. You should be aware of these limitations and speak with your hosting provider to see if they can handle your increased traffic. The last thing you want is a user who can’t place an order because when they view your site, they are seeing Resources Exceeded instead of your website.

 

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  If you are asking today if your business is ready for a Black Friday Rush, it may already be a bit late to change your preparations for this year – but it’s still good to take a look.  Online businesses and brick and mortar businesses have a lot in common, they both are trying to capture that surge of traffic around the busiest shopping season of the year.

Black Friday got to this place of massive discounts and big glitzy promotions over the last 25+ years due to the basic supply and demand equation.   Since the early 1980’s the amount of brick and mortar retail floor space across the United States has increased on average 4% year over year, yet the population has only increased roughly 1% each year.  In short, there are more stores and items to shop than 25+ years ago on a per person basis (more supply and less demand).

 

According to Gallup, consumers estimate they will spend just $704 this holiday shopping season, on average. This is down from 2012, when the average consumer said they would spend $770.  All this is leading to more businesses competing for customer attention by using glitz, glamor and of course massive discount promotions to lure you in.  Black Friday is the big event of the year for many of these retailers – online, and brick, and mortar alike.

 

Online businesses are of course more recent to the ball game than the brick and mortar retail stores – but similarly compete for the attention of online buyers, and often have similar showcased promotions this time of year. Similar to brick and mortar retail stores, the online businesses have to fight that same supply and demand concept to get as many potential clients eye-balling their products and services versus their competitors – and its common to see deep discounts, promotions and low pricing to lure your attention.

Planned promotional strategy is the official term in business speak, but the reality for healthy well run businesses is wisely used discounting to bring new and existing clients to the store or web site.  It could be that $100 TV door-buster to get you in the store which in turn leads you to spend extra money on accessories and other high profit products (say special audio visual cables that have massive mark ups that help balance out the profit of selling that $100 TV door-buster).  Buy 1 get 1 free, 75% off black Friday discounts, super-sized upgrades, etc are all part of a well run business utilizing discounts to grab market attention.

Retail stores run into problems during the big rush for black Friday because literally there are more people than their stores can handle waiting at the doors, too busy a show-room floor for people to browse, and too few discount items (say that $100 TV at the door) to go to everyone who wants one – which can lead to customer dis-satisfaction and even hinder the overall goal which is for the business to make a profit by having the client browse all those high-mark up accessories next to the discounted items.

 

It’s crucial any business be ready for the potential rush.  Online businesses are no different, and online businesses have the extra ability to handle larger sudden volumes of transactions as long as their ecommerce system, web site and back end servers can handle the traffic spike during the busy season.  The last thing you want to do is be selling buy 1 get 1 free offers, and have your web site so slow that the consumer won’t stay in the shopping cart check out process to browse the profitable add-on items you are using to make up the profit margin.  It’s essential to plan ahead, have a fast and reliable web site, good back end cloud-based servers that can scale on demand and provide reliability when you need it most.  You don’t want to be caught with all your clients trapped outside the store with no way for them to get in and shop when it counts most, online or in-person at your retail location.

So if you are an online store, brick and mortar, or selling via online auction sites – plan ahead and be prepared for the Black Friday Rush.

 

 

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